{"id":114108,"date":"2017-08-09T14:49:00","date_gmt":"2017-08-09T19:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/todays-big-4-tech-giants-appeal-human-biology-good-health\/"},"modified":"2024-12-23T00:35:45","modified_gmt":"2024-12-23T05:35:45","slug":"todays-big-4-tech-giants-appeal-human-biology-good-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-gb\/insights\/blog\/strategy\/todays-big-4-tech-giants-appeal-human-biology-good-health\/","title":{"rendered":"How today\u2019s big 4 tech giants appeal to human biology\u2026but is this good for our health?"},"content":{"rendered":"

To understand why today\u2019s leading digital businesses are so successful, we need to bring it back to human biology, says Scott Galloway<\/a>, founder of digital performance company L2 Inc. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple…we turn to them daily like trusted friends, and our usage and loyalty continues to increase year-on-year; but why do they have such a persistent hold over us, which has endured in some cases for 15 years or more?<\/p>\n

\u201cBusiness mimics biology\u201d says Galloway and his compelling talk along with the illustration below offer food for thought, and the overall message is quite striking.<\/p>\n

Google has become our number one port of call for information, and we trust that it will give us the answers we\u2019re looking for. The search giant processes trillions of searches every year, and yet 15% of those daily queries have never been seen by Google before. Our problems get bigger and bigger, although globally we are better educated than ever before. Google\u2019s Knowledge Graph acts and functions a lot like the human brain and has more than 570 million entities and a staggering 18 billion facts about connections between them, by Google\u2019s count.<\/p>\n

I remember Google back in the early days, when it was only just beginning to understand where we, the searcher, were in the world; when we needed to know complex \u2018hacks\u2019 to ensure it responded to our query as specifically as possible, and when we couldn\u2019t always rely on Google returning the information we were after. But today individuals ask Google questions that they would be too embarrassed to ask in public, they seek medical advice from Google before seeing a doctor, and our children rely on it to supplement their education. Google has become an artifical extension of our brain and it\u2019s hard to imagine life without it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Facebook, by comparison, feeds on the human desire to feel needed and loved, and helps to create empathy at scale. In the real world, love and friendship have been proven to extend life expectancy. Some studies have shown that having more “friends” on Facebook gives people a greater sense of social support, for example.<\/p>\n

But there has also been much research to show that Facebook could be creating mental health issues too. Holly Shakya from the University of California, San Diego and Nicholas Christakis from Yale carried out a\u00a0broad study<\/a>\u00a0published earlier this year, which points to the negative impact of Facebook. The researchers tracked just over 5,000 adults over the course of three years (2013\u20132015), gathering information on their use of the social network as well as self-reported information about their health, both physical and mental, their weight, and general well-being, and findings were also compared with real world interactions. The most notable finding of the study was that for every 1% increase in “likes,” clicks on links and status updates, the researchers saw a 5%\u00a0to 8% decrease in the individual\u2019s self-reported mental health.<\/p>\n

A separate study<\/a>\n

\n \n
\n
\n

\n Stay Forward <\/h2>\n

\n Get exclusive insights into digital
media's top-trending topics delivered
directly to your inbox. <\/p>\n <\/div>\n\n

\n
\n
\n
\n \n